Independent Investigative Journalism and Commentary from New Orleans, LA

Thursday, November 08, 2012

Clarification in the vote on the CCC toll...

I am all about accuracy and I need to call attention to some vague assumptions I made, in the previous post, about how the CCC toll vote went down. My description was not accurate in the previous post but I will give you the most accurate description I have here:

The election supervisors finished counting the "early voting" ballots, reported to be about 26,000 votes, around 1 am. They then immediately started tallying another 4,000 mail/fax/email ballots which they finished between 2 and 2:30 am.

It's important to note that the election supervisors were locked into the vote counting room at about 2 pm on Tuesday...previous to all the votes coming in. They can not leave the room (I guess unless they need to take a dump or something) until all the votes for the election day are counted. If someone enters the room (for whatever reason) during the vote counting period they are not allowed to leave the room until the vote counting process is complete.

I can confirm that Clancy Dubos of Gambit magazine was watching the process with a trained eye, as reported by the Times Picayune (not by me). I haven't confirmed anyone else who was monitoring the process but I'm working on that.

Somewhere around midnight, the "people watching" were made aware that there were about 30,000 or so absentee/early-voting/mail-in/faxed-in/etc./ ballots that had not yet been counted with some of these ballots having to be "fed into scanners".

Ok...past this info...it gets hairy. I have information from different sources but I have no idea what the protocol was for the 30,000 ballots or how they made their way into the mix. I am trying to fill in all the blanks and will do my best as soon as I get more info.